Since the end of the Cold War, few foreign-policy concepts have drawn as much attention as soft power – the ability to influence the behaviour of others through the power of culture, political ideals and sound foreign policies. The normative underpinning was that a soft power–minded foreign policy could strengthen a country’s reputation and hence its ability to shape and influence its international environment. When Joseph Nye Jr. published Bound to Lead in 1990, coining the soft-power term as a conceptual rebuttal to Paul Kennedy’s American-decline thesis in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, he could hardly have predicted the worldwide scholarly and policy debates that it has generated in the decades since. Nye himself has been an active and generous participant in those debates, engaging his critics – from leading scholars and practitioners to students at the School of Marxism at Peking University – with several books and many articles. Geoff Heriot joins these debates at an auspicious time.

In its simplest and most intuitive form, soft power is the opposite of hard power, the latter usually associated with the use or threatened use of military force and coercive economic measures. A key question of the many that were raised in both policy and scholarly debates was how to find a balance between hard and soft power. A conceptual compromise was developed as smart power, devised and promoted in a 2007 independent commission report co-authored by Nye under the auspices of the influential Washington DC-based Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS). Smart power was seen as ‘the successful combination of hard and soft power resources into effective strategy’. For Nye, smart power, more so than soft power, ‘was deliberately prescriptive rather than just analytical’.

The smart power term was subsequently used by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration and in many other countries as well, tellingly in China. If a weakness of soft power was its perception as a blunt instrument largely out of reach from governmental facilitation in democracies, then smart power honed it. This refinement allowed for a more judicious balance between ‘measured national self-interest’ (to paraphrase Princeton University’s John Ikenberry) and ‘good international citizenship’ (in the words of former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans).

In their broadcasts of professional ice hockey games, The Sports Network (TSN for short), a Canadian cable television network, would identify and feature highlights of what the announcers would refer to as the “TSN Turning Point.” That is, in any given hockey game, the turning point in question was some event—often a goal or a great save, but perhaps also an untimely penalty, a key injury, or even a fight—that could in retrospect be marked as the discrete point at which the “game” turned in favor of the eventual victor. Notably, the turning point is not necessarily, or even ever, the gamewinning goal, which is to say the particular event that is proven to have assured victory by definition. No, that would be a rather uninspired choice. Instead, it might be the event that swung the momentum, that deflated the eventual losing side or energized the winning side, often well before the actual gamewinner is scored. As such, it has a certain ineffable quality in the moment. Players, coaches, commentators, and fans may be able to sense when such a momentous occurrence is taking place, and they can certainly speculate as to whether this or that play might be the point at which things will prove to have turned the winner’s way, but it is clear that the true TSN Turning Point cannot be ascertained until the game is over, until all the play has ended, and we are able to look back on the game in its totality to find the moment or moments when everything changed. In the midst of things, those experiencing or witnessing what may later be recognized as the turning point cannot be certain of the meaning of the situation. Only from a perspective made available sometime later can we may look back upon the game to discover the turning point, which is to say the most significant moment in the narrative we must retrospectively produce about the events that were occurring in real time. Although he was not thinking about it with respect to hockey, this is in part what Hegel meant by his evocative line about the Owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk. The turning point, like the narrative in which it functions, cannot be known in the moment of its happening, but only afterwards.

Introduction

In the medieval period, specifically from the fifth to eighth centuries in the Chinese historical context, the Buddhist community produced a voluminous literature, which became an invaluable resource for understanding the roles of animals in medieval religious life. This Buddhist literature not only included numerous translations rendered from Indic and Central Asian languages such as Gāndhārī and Tocharian, or which many original texts were lost, but also commentaries and collections of magical stories. In these texts, there were encounters and adaptations between Buddhist ideas and Chinese indigenous thoughts. Unlike many other world and local religions, Buddhism developed a sophisticated cosmology in which animals occupied one of the six realms for the birth, death, and rebirth of all lives or sentient beings in Buddhist terms. The Buddhist idea of reincarnation created a blurry boundary between humans and animals. In other words, in Buddhist literature, humans may be reborn as animals and vice versa, which also applies to gods and spirits. Drawing upon sources from medieval Chinese Buddhist literature centered on the Mahāvaipulya-mahāsaṃnipāta-Sūtra (hereafter abbreviated to MMS), this chapter examines how twelve animals first appeared as compassionate deities and then as demonic spirits in these sources and how Buddhist and Chinese intellectual traditions shaped this transformation.

The MMS is a sizeable collective scripture of early Mahāyāna Buddhist texts which did not survive in its entirety in any language. Some fragments in Sanskrit have been identified as parts of this significant scripture. Among numerous Sanskrit manuscripts found in Gilgit, Khotan, and other places in Central Asia, some fragments of the Sanskrit texts have been identified as those of the Ratnaketudhāraṇī, which is equivalent to the ninth chapter (Baochuang fen 寶幢分) of the Chinese MMS. There is also a separate Chinese translation Baoxing Tuoluoni Jing 寶星陀羅尼經 translated by Prabhāmitra in the Tang Dynasty and the lengths is about twice of the ninth chapter of the Chinese MMS. Although there is no complete equivalent text in Sanskrit, the Chinese and Tibetan translations that perhaps represent substantial portions, have survived in numerous scrolls and manuscripts. In the Tibetan canon, there is no complete equivalent of the MMS either.

Introduction

In this chapter, I argue that Wittgenstein’s morphological-comparative method could be an important epistemological tool for understanding different cultures and systems, thereby improving intercultural understanding. In particular, I argue that the acknowledgement of the contingent and ungrounded nature of our conceptual system prevents us from evaluating alternative systems as strange, or unnatural, and this observation encompasses both an epistemic concern and an ethical one.

As it is, my position stands on the following two points:

• i) There is, indeed, something similar to a morphological-comparative method which Wittgenstein explicitly expounds and employs.

• ii) There is an ethical tone to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and it should be understood in connection to aesthetics.

These points are not commonly accepted by scholars. Certainly, there is a tendency to emphasize the ethical tone of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, especially by the followers of the therapeutic reading of his philosophy and, more recently, by the New Wittgensteinians. For example, in his On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy, Conant states that for Wittgenstein ‘all philosophical thinking and writing has […] its ethical aspect’ and that learning to think better is an important means to becoming a better human being (Conant 2002, 85). Indeed, it might be tempting to give an ethical reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for both ideological and biographical reasons. On the one hand, it seems as though Wittgenstein always lived in a state of moral tension, a sort of stoic attitude towards life that influenced his conception of philosophical work (Monk 1990). On the other, Wittgenstein himself wrote to Ludwig von Ficker that his first work, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, had an ethical point, for it refrained from talking about what is usually called ‘ethics’, as ethics ‘can only be delimitated from within, by being silent about it’ (Andronico 2013, 25). But these are not the ways in which the ethical tone is understood by advocates of the therapeutic reading, as they examine Cavell’s reflection on the rediscovery of the ordinary.

Introduction

In this chapter, I shall introduce the concept of translation according to W.V. Quine and Wittgenstein, then discuss the concept of interculturality implicit in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and subsequently, following Wittgenstein, Cavell and Veena Das, defend an ordinary anthropology as a renewed understanding of the intercultural.

In developing my argument, I shall draw not only on my work on these and other authors, and on my research on popular culture, but also on my own life experience as a French philosopher working in the analytic tradi-tion. My earliest research, in the 1980s, investigated the philosophy of Quine, an emblematic American scholar of the twentieth century, who contributed to the hybridization of classical American philosophy and pragmatism with the analytic philosophy of the Vienna Circle; and who proposed a groundbreaking thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, which does not affirm the untranslatability but the indeterminacy between languages, and the multiplicity of the choices that are available to a translator. Despite my analytic training, I have always been resistant to analytic philosophy’s ambition of becoming a global idiom or the universal language of philosophical communication: first, because of the obvious intellectual, conceptual and ethnocentric domination it presupposed; and second, because of the linguistic and cultural richness I had experienced in the differences in languages. From the start, American language and culture – which I had learnt to love during my childhood trips to the United States to see my grandparents – intrigued me, not for their power of universalization, but as a particular language, which we could refer to as ‘ordinary’ language. With Cavell, I discovered a philosophy of this ordinary language, of the ordinary itself, as well as a language that, in translating it, I found to be untranslatable in the strictest sense, with terms that have no equivalent in French: claim; mean; fun; care; matter. It was only natural, then, that, on the French side, I joined Barbara Cassin’s project Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, which aimed to describe the terms of both ordinary and philosophical English language. One particular aim of this chapter is to illustrate that popular culture – cinema and television series – which is an integral element of global culture, as well as local culture through their connection to an ordinary form of life, have the capacity to create genuine intercultural idioms.

Nine years after the advent of commercial radio broadcasting in Australia, and seven years prior to the onset of World War II, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons launched the newly constituted Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) from a radio studio in Sydney. From 8 pm on that day, 1 July 1932, listeners in the prime minister’s home state on the island of Tasmania could hear him only through atmospheric static because no telephone link existed with the mainland (Inglis 2006, p. 5). The broadcast had to be picked up long-distance from Sydney and relayed via the local transmitters of station 7ZL in Hobart.

On 20 December 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies launched international radio broadcasts in the English, German, Dutch and Spanish languages; noting that, although Australia lay 12,000 miles from Europe, ‘we are nevertheless involved in a European war and in full partnership with Great Britain in its conduct’ (Hodge 1995, p. 8). By 1942, ‘Australia Calling’ also broadcast in Japanese. It operated under the wartime government Department of Information except for the two years between July 1942 and April 1944 when the public service broadcaster (ABC) administered it. But the government information department controlled its news and commentaries even during that two-year period (Hodge 1995, p. 11).

Provenance is germane when considering the character and conduct of the Australian form of international broadcasting. Even if an embellishment, it is worth recalling Peter Drucker’s often-cited comment that organisational ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ (Edgar, Campbell & Stonehouse 2011). Institutional history, the evolution of organising principles and the consolidation of production norms prove to be compelling forces of indoctrination. This chapter provides a brief account of the ABC’s development as a national–domestic and an international broadcaster in the decades prior to 1983 when Parliament enacted legislation to re-constitute and modernise the organisation. That legislative change, detailed in Chapter 7, represents a useful baseline for the pre- and post-1983 era and its reconstitution as a corporation. Prior to 1983, the ABC’s national–domestic and its international services operated in closer proximity to government and under more direct administrative authority than in the decades since.

Henry Abbott was born in 1764 in Pera, a suburb of Constantinople, to a well-to-do family of expatriated merchants and consuls, among whom he was brought up in Ankara and Aleppo before moving to India. Abbott lived and worked in India between 1785 and 1802. He died in Blackheath, Kent, on 12 February 1820, age 55. In Calcutta, he married Margaret Welsh, the daughter of William Welsh of Edinburgh, with whom he had several children, all of whom were influential in the British military and diplomatic service in the East. His son James Abbott (1807–1896) served as the deputy governor of the district of Hazara in North-West India. Fredrik Abbott (1805–1892) joined a British military regiment, the Bengal Engineers, in 1823 and fought in the first Burmese War (1824–1826). Saunders (1811–1894) and Augustus (1804–1867) served in the British army in Bengal. Keith Edward Abbott (1814–1873) served as the consul-general of Great Britain in Tehran and Tabriz (1842–1856). Henry’s family in the Levant were mostly based in Ankara, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Aleppo and Beirut. His father Joseph Abbott, as Henry wrote in his diary, established ‘a mercantile house of business’ in Ankara (Abbott n.d: 3). His uncle George was ‘a very affluent man’ in Istanbul (Ibid). Another uncle Bartholomew Edward Abbott, a Levant Company proconsul and merchant, was one of the richest men in Ottoman Salonica. His uncles John, who held the position of a consul to the Levant Company factory in Aleppo from 1770 until his death in 1783, and Robert, a merchant, were responsible for Henry’s education after he moved to Aleppo in 1774.

In Aleppo, Henry was brought up in an enterprising family of merchants who lived and worked in the Levant for many years. The Levant Company chaplain at the time, the Reverend Robert Foster, ‘a man of education & talents & an excellent scholar’, as Abbott wrote in his memoire, had tutored the young Henry (Abbott n.d, 9).

Journalist and one-time diplomat Bruce Grant wrote that relations with Indonesia have provided ‘the crucible of modern Australian foreign policy’ (Grant 1972, p. 81). For senior international relations bureaucrat, intelligence chief and analyst Allan Gyngell, it remained the most difficult relationship for Australia to manage of all its Southeast Asian neighbours (Gyngell 2017b, p. 161). Political sensitivities extended beyond the Australia–Indonesia relationship to involve the formerly Australia-administered Papua New Guinea. In the 1970s and 1980s, these co-existed as three countries in close strategic proximity: the archipelagic giant of Indonesia, the recently independent Papua New Guinea with a population of three million and the Western democracy of Australia, a product of colonialism with its own neo-colonialist elements. The three nations were unlike in almost every respect1 – in ethnicity and language, religion and culture, political ideology and governance norms, socio-economic status, topography, and their relative diplomatic and military power. Disparity of circumstance and the strategic proximity of near neighbours provided the crucible for conflicted relationships.

Australia’s relative remoteness from the principal European–Atlantic theatres of Cold War confrontation enabled it to express more easily the persona of a sincere and practical figure ‘helping others out rather than (engaging) in the contest of ideas or geopolitical strategy’ (Walker 2019, p. 63). In 2006, Simon Anholt (p. 46) puzzled over the world’s apparent love for ‘relatively remote’ and ‘exotic’ Australia, noting it was easier for countries not in the mainstream of global politics to achieve good rankings for their ‘nation brand’. But now, with Asia at the fulcrum of geopolitical contestation, Australia is immediately affected and its fundamental organising principle is to ‘stay on the winning side’ (Fernandes 2018, p. 2). The challenge of fitting values into foreign policy becomes greater as national interests become more intense (Gyngell 2017a). For that reason, the crucible of twentieth-century foreign policy might allude to complexities of international political communication in the contested present century. Accordingly, this chapter deals with the potential and the constraints of the international broadcaster’s discursive power projection, in relation to Australia’s transactional and ideological imperatives.

The study of Radio Australia’s broadcasting to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea demonstrates its conduct in relation to the three key success factors discussed in Chapter 6.

In his Preface to Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (2011), Jonathan Arac reflects upon his more than forty-year career as a literary scholar, critic, and historian, tying his own multifaceted project to the inspiring figures of Walter Benjamin and Edward Said, “two exiles, the Jew and the Arab,” whose critical thinking had fueled Arac’s own work. Arac refers especially to his personal experience, first as a university student, then as a professor, but in naming these two thinkers—two radically different, yet somehow mutually resonating cultural critics—Arac also registers the degree to which mixed, hybrid, or indeed “impure” strains of critical inquiry contribute to his own distinctive work. As Arac puts it, the phrase impure worlds “names a zone of inquiry and resource that has shaped my thought for a long time.” Indeed, one might go so far as to say that “purity,” in literature, culture, and society, is inimical to criticism, in as much as literature, a social institution, necessarily reflects and gives form to the heterogeneous elements that make up social experience in a distinct time and place. Benjamin’s kaleidoscopic analysis of the Paris arcades and Said’s contrapuntal, secular criticism offer examples of this critical vocation in practice. So does Arac’s new literary history of the age of the novel, an era in which that form’s heteroglossia and multi-formalism, as Mikhail Bakhtin explored so evocatively, approximates the transformative diversity of the societies and cultures in which it is produced.

With Arac, this commitment to “impurity” underwrites a methodological imperative as well, as he has consistently sought to trouble disciplinary distinctions, making connections between previously separate phenomena and finding hidden affiliations among apparently unrelated writers and texts. It would be difficult to characterize Arac’s body of work, given the sort of professional, disciplinary, or subdisciplinary labels available to us. To be sure, Arac is an Americanist, particularly with respect to nineteenth-century American literature, and he has written influential articles and books on Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and others. His book-length study of narrative forms in the nineteenth-century United States, which appeared in the monumental Cambridge History of American Literature project edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and was later made available in bookform in 2005 as The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860, confirms his status as one of the most prominent scholars of this period, place, and genre.

One of the main objectives of this chapter is to make explicit Cora Diamond’s approach to ethics, as it is developed in Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics (Diamond 2019). I suggest that this approach could work as a guide to questions of intercultural understanding. One central idea is that the Wittgensteinian philosopher, here embodied by Diamond, is not, contrary to what is often assumed, an ethical and cultural relativist. In Diamond’s view, the pluralism of language games presented in the Philosophical Investigations does not imply a view of incommensurable language games, moral language games in particular, in human cultures.

Neither Williams’ Nietzschean Pluralism nor Wiggins’ Cognitivism: A Framework and an Example

In Chapter 7 of her book Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins, Diamond closely examines a debate on truth and objectivity in ethics between Bernard Williams and David Wiggins. The debate occurred in the mid-1990s in the journal Ratio. Diamond’s own view on ethics, influenced by Wittgenstein and Anscombe, leads her to be critical of both Wiggins’ moral cognitivism and Williams’ Nietzschean pluralism. She has no doubts, though, that she is closer to Wiggins’ position than to Williams’. She devotes significant attention to one particular example used in the Williams–Wiggins dispute: slavery, or the thought that ‘slavery is unjust and insupportable’ as it was suggested in the nineteenth-century debate on slavery in the United States. The example illustrates an idea of Wiggins which Diamond herself wants to adopt: the idea that in some cases, given the reasons available to think that p, there is nothing else to think but that p:

The networks and applications of twenty-first-century communications technology have broadened media access massively while having the effect of amplifying and intensifying the force of political messaging. Yet a conceptual through line can be drawn between the character and organising principles of twentieth-century international broadcasting and those of today. This chapter offers an overview of the rise and character of international broadcasting as practised by totalitarian/authoritarian and democratic states. It also examines the conditions and processes of communicative exchange required for a broadcaster to engage with and predispose target audiences to influence and persuasion. As an agent of the state in international politics since World War II, international broadcasting has straddled competing ‘efforts to spread information and efforts to control its spread’ (Shaheed 2019, p. 4). The practice has been deployed for benign or hostile purposes, to build trust, to proselytise or to wage psychological warfare.

A correspondent of Moscow’s Novosti news agency, Karl Nepomnyashchi, claimed that American, German and Canadian broadcasters had been ‘the real masters of the black heavens’ during the Cold War (Short 1986, p. 4). He spoke of their ‘vile role’ (Nelson 1997, p. vi) in circumventing the Soviet Union’s control of information during its invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. So long as listeners had access to high-frequency (shortwave) radio receivers, they could circumvent the censorship imposed by their own governments. Shortwave offered the facility of long-distance transmissions that could not be blocked except at considerable expense. In 1984, Indonesian scholar Juwono Sudarsono commented that the Western media presence constituted ‘one of the more powerful instruments of power projection by the United States and its democratic allies’ (Sudarsono 1984). Two decades later, in March 2005, Radio Australia’s Hidayat Djajamihardja recalled how the bellboy of a hotel in Dili pursued him across the foyer, wishing to make a ‘courtesy call’ on the Indonesian-born broadcast journalist (Djajamihardja 2005). They had never met. But that voice! Without hesitation the bellboy recognised its cadence and timbre. He told Hidayat of the years under Indonesian occupation of East Timor when local people lowered the volume on their shortwave radio receivers so they could listen, undetected, to the news from Radio Australia.

Edward Ives’s A Voyage from England to India (1773), as we shall see, is the first English travel book about the overland routes in which we find an Englishman from a humble background, a surgeon by profession, telling his readers how Ottoman governors in different cities in Syria and Mesopotamia highly respected English travellers in their land. He reported how he and his companions enjoyed the hospitality of Muslim rulers, showing how the English were highly respected for their polite manners and accommodating behaviour towards non-Europeans. Travelling in the East, as this chapter shows, offered Ives opportunities to reinvent the Self abroad as one of improvement, respectability and politeness; the idea of being among others – a manifestation of a ‘relational’ condition in the making of the modern self, one ‘outwardly or social turned’ as Dror Wharman has argued – allowed Ives to reimagine the old regime of identity in England in which boundaries were strictly demarcated by fixed markers in contrast to the modern age known for mutability and transience, what Marshall Berman in 1982, via Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, called, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Before he set out to the East, Ives was one of those ‘rambling mind[s] and a fortune too narrow to allow’ one ‘to travel like a gentleman’, as Alexander Hamilton in 1739 put it (Hamilton 1739: xxvi). But the idea of joining the Royal Navy as a surgeon gave Ives many opportunities to rub shoulders with people, European and non-Europeans, from different social and economic backgrounds, which enabled him to perform the character of a modern gentleman whose manners and appearance rather than his lineage, family background and religious piety defined his identity. In his travel book, Ives used polite performances and the ethos of improvement well known among the upwardly mobile middling ranks of eighteenth-century Britain to negotiate the freedoms and challenges of modernity.

Introduction

In his book Anthropolog y and Religion, Robert L. Winzeler offers a list of roles of animals in religious belief and practice, including animals as a god, deities, or cult creatures, animals as totems, animals as were-animals, animals as omen creatures, animals as tricksters, and animals as objects of taboo. While making examples of the were-animals, he particularly mentioned the werewolves in Europe and were-tigers in Indonesia and Malaysia. Besides South and Southeast Asia, East Asia also had folklores on the weretigers. After all, the were-tiger culture is deeply rooted in Asia’s natural environment and ecology. Tigers were a significant apex predator across nearly half the Asian continent, which could be found historically in most regions of Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia. Unfortunately, the tiger became distinct from Central Asia in the tenth century and disappeared in Java and Bali in the twentieth century. Nowadays, only the Bengal tiger, Amor tiger, South China tiger, and Sumatra tiger still struggle to survive as endangered species in some nature reserves and zoos across South, Southeast, and East Asia. While interacting with humans, tigers not only appear as real nonhuman animals in the historical experience of human life but also play crucial roles in the spiritual and emotional experience of human life and culture. Contemporary scholars have studied tigers from agriculture, ecology, environmental history, and animal history perspectives.

The study of the were-tigers in Asia can be traced back to the rise of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. When Europeans began their adventures in the Asian continent, they gradually exposed themselves to the information about the tigers and were-tigers in Asia. They then developed preliminary studies on the were-tigers in the early twentieth century, undoubtedly inspired by their knowledge of the werewolves in Europe. In 1901, Jan J. J. de Groot first examined the were-tigers in Chinese history and literature in the ancient and medieval times in a chapter of volume four of his monumental book The Religious System of China. In traditional Chinese texts, he mainly introduced numerous stories about the transformations from tigers to humans. Then nearly one century later, Charles E. Hammond analyzes the symbolic use of the tiger and were-tigers in the ancient lore of China.

The Levant Company appointed Abraham Parsons as a consul in Iskenderun, Turkey, in 1767. Parsons served in the Levant for six years before deciding to retire in Leghorn in Italy where he died in 1785. Seven years earlier, Parsons had undertaken a journey of ‘commercial speculations’, as John Paine Berjew, the editor of Parsons’s travel account, wrote in the preface to Parsons’s Travels in Asia and Africa (Parsons 1808: iii). From his travel book, we learn that Parsons had joined an Arab caravan travelling between Aleppo and Basra where he lived for a few months before boarding a British ship sailing towards India. In 1776, he arrived in Bombay, then moved to Surat and Madras before returning to Europe by way of Suez, Cairo and Alexandria. The details of this long journey were published posthumously in 1808 in a book many in Britain found somewhat repetitive and dull unlike most travel books of the period, which were known for the stories they told about their authors’ adventures and suffering in exotic climes. The Monthly Review suggested that Parsons’s ‘travels bespeak the man of business more than the man of letters and afford us the result of actual observation without much benefit from disquisition or research’ (1810: 288). For the London Review, there is no doubt that Parsons’s book lacks the literary and scholarly quality one finds in previous and contemporary accounts about the Levant. But what is even odd about the book is that it does little to explain differences between societies beyond just the Enlightenment discourse of progress. Parsons, The London Review in 1809 wrote, ‘looks only on the artificial and obvious distinction between the modes of society in states: he knows nothing of the more recondite discriminations that separate, as it were, the souls of communities; and even, in the midst of the most liberal and enlightened intercourse, keep nation distinct from nation.